The Tango
by greyslostwho
Summary: Part 3 of the Dances series. "There's something almost like an addiction to her, though. He doesn't think he's going to be able to be the one to call it off." Oneshot.


**THE TANGO**

**Part 3 of the Dances series, but here's everything that's happened if you need a refresh/this is your first venture into the Dances series:**

**-Nikki married Aidan O'Connor, had a daughter called Leanne, whom Harry kept coming over to see**

**-arrives early one time to a crying Nikki, discovers Nikki and Aidan are not very happy in their marriage anymore, Nikki's been told she can't have any more children, and Aidan always wanted a son **

**-Aidan's away for a few days, Nikki and Harry begin an affair**

**This is set directly from the end of Early. **

They find themselves panting, stark naked on Nikki's kitchen floor that first time, but there's a smile back on her face, and he supposes that sorts everything out. He lifts her in his arms and carries her up to her bed, where she pulls him in beside her, and he doesn't really have it in him to argue.

As they take the affair into round two, he tries very hard not to think about the fact that this is as much her husband's bed as it is hers, and everything they're doing could just, in the long term, be causing her more problems. And then her lips are travelling down his chest, and he doesn't really need to try anymore to shut out those thoughts.

* * *

He awakes to someone shaking him. The sun's rising outside, and Nikki's shaking him, looking a little frantic.

"Leanne usually comes in when she wakes up in the morning, Harry… you'd better not be here… please can you take the spare room…" she sighs, leaning her forehead against his for a moment. "I'm sorry, I just… I'm not even managing to explain this to myself at the moment, let alone my daughter…"

He creeps away across the hallway, hanging his head, almost shamefully. Because she's _Nikki, _and he's always loved Nikki; but he knows what he's doing, and he's always told himself he was never going to be that man.

There's something almost like an addiction to her, though. He doesn't think he's going to be able to be the one to call it off.

* * *

They don't talk about it the next day, by the time he feels it appropriate to surface she's sat at the breakfast bar (yes, that breakfast bar) with Leanne, and they're both smiling and eating Cheerios and the look on her face as he comes in the door doesn't say it never happened, it just says she's not talking about it now.

They take Leanne to a local soft play park after that, and they sit at a cheap plastic table in the parents' area, and they talk about anything but last night. They talk about the state of the economy, how Leanne's faring in her first year at school, and he enquires about how things are turning round, changing at the Lyell Centre now she's Professor and is leading the team.

Cliché as it seems, there's a giant elephant in the room, and he can't seem to shake it off, even as they point-blank refuse to discuss anything vaguely relating to the occurrences the previous night. He can't help forgetting how tired and lonely she'd looked when he arrived yesterday, and right now, although she's smiling, it looks somehow shaky. She's always been his weakness, and he doesn't want to shake her up again, not right now. He wants to keep her as she is.

* * *

Everything's brushed under the table for the rest of the day, and Leanne's in earshot at all times, there's nothing either of them can say, without lighting an un-extinguishable fuse. Nikki has a few too many glasses of wine with her dinner, and then they both put her daughter to bed, and for a moment they stand in the kitchen again, and the room's thick with silence.

All arguments against everything that's happening seem to dissolve in his throat then, before he can even bring himself to say anything, and then she's walking towards him, reaching out slightly, and he knows almost, before anything starts, what's going to happen.

She puts her hands on both of his upper arms, and looks up into his face.

She shakes her head slightly, as if almost at herself. "I… I haven't felt about Aidan for a long time the way I feel about you right now."

He wants to argue, ask her what exactly it is she's feeling about him right now, where exactly this is going, where on earth it's going to take them, whether they should maybe take a step back and admit defeat: that they've never had the right timing with each other.

He wishes he had the guts to say, he supposes, that if what she's feeling about him right now is anything like what he's feeling about her, he's been feeling it for more than a decade.

But there's an increasing spread of worry on her face, and, now more than ever, she's the only woman he's ever loved quite like this, so doesn't have time to say anything (saying something would mean he had to think, and if he was thinking, he might think better of this), and he kisses her.

* * *

After that, they seem to be in some sort of downward spiral. They both spend all their private hours that long weekend in the spare room, Nikki creeps back into her bedroom in the morning before Leanne emerges. He flies home on Tuesday morning, and Leanne's at school, so she takes him to the airport and kisses him brazenly before he goes through customs, neither of them thinking anything about who could see them, what they're doing.

He does a lot of thinking, however, on the flight back to New York, and he comes to the conclusion that he's not going to say anything to her, but if she was to bring this up again, try anything again, he needs to tell her he's not this man, he's not prepared to be her bit on the side indefinitely, this needs to stop.

* * *

That argument all goes to pot two months later, when there's a knock on his door in the evening and it's Nikki, laughing slightly that she'd volunteered for the place on a conference about the pathological signs of early onset Alzheimer's, one of the conferences that both of them would have laughed at and possibly snoozed in the lecture theatre years ago, before everything got this complicated.

She loops her arms around his neck and before he can even think about arguing, her lips are on his and he can't even remember what he was complaining about.

She stays with him for the best part of a week, spending most of her time in his bed, rolling her eyes sufficiently at the lectures she attends in the morning. She kisses him in the airport when she leaves, giving him a secretive, sultry smile, and saying Aidan's going to Ireland to play golf with his friends for a week in September, does he want to come spend some time with her and Leanne?

He knows it's all gone too far when he doesn't even think about refusing.

* * *

He spends a blissful week in her spare room again, and he's beginning to think he could get used to all this; he could definitely start making a habit of the whole thing. He now knows for definite that he'll never have the heart to turn her away. They take Leanne to the beach on the Saturday, his penultimate day, and as he sits on the sand, Nikki sunbathing next to him, her daughter making a very detailed sandcastle a few yards away, it strikes him how much they suddenly look like a family. And feel like a family, to a degree.

* * *

He's not anyone else's man, anymore. His young brunettes are a thing of the past; he doesn't look in anyone else's direction. He's becoming a bit of a miserable old man in New York; he's not even overly sociable anymore. Part of that's all his colleagues – they're all married with children, and there's something so much more _right _about their lives, and there's some sort of the jealousy lurking under the surface when he goes out and makes polite conversation with them.

He drinks then, and then bad things happen. He forgets what he's doing, where he is, anything that's going on with Nikki in his dysfunctional disastrous normal life, and he ends up not being responsible for his actions.

Like Kelly, one of his old types, in fact, but even younger, barely 25, when he's had far too much to drink to even think, let along judge what's a good idea.

She ends up in his bed, and she skulks out in the morning, her face flush with embarrassment, he's twice her age.

He thinks, then. About how when he wakes to a face that isn't Nikki's, he feels slightly nauseous initially, he doesn't want to be with anyone else, and that's not even beginning to be right, because she's still married, for heaven's sake. Though from what she says, she and Aidan hardly have anything to do with each other anymore; he spends as much time as possible with his friends and family in Ireland.

But he can't keep going, not like this. He's letting his life waste in her arms, and although she's never been anything but perfect to him, is she ever going to be his forever option? Is she ever really going to be his?

He books a flight, then.

* * *

When he knocks on their door, Aidan answers, suited and ready to go to work, having already taken Leanne to school, but apparently he's finishing his breakfast. Harry illustrates some useless excuse for being in the country, something about a conference in pathology lecturing, and Aidan buys it, but he can see Nikki's eyebrows rising from the other side of the kitchen; she doesn't say anything, however. When Aidan goes to work – he leaves without even a kiss on his wife's cheek, Harry notes – she turns to him, arms folded protectively across her chest, and in that moment, she looks _tired._

"What is it?"

In possibly the hardest thing he's ever said, he tells her he can't do this anymore, and suddenly she's crying, and she looks so lost and hopeless that he's saying something about _one last time _together, and they're struggling up the stairs to her bedroom, and both of them are possibly hungrier for one another than they've ever been before.

If they'd been thinking straight, they'd have seen Aidan's laptop against the wall in the bedroom, and they'd have predicted it wouldn't take him long to realise he'd left it there, and he'd be heading back any minute now.

But they don't, and as it is, they're both naked and Nikki's straddling Harry when her husband bursts into the bedroom.

Nikki slides off Harry, her face pale with shock, and wraps herself in the sheets, suddenly strangely self-aware of her own nudity in front of her husband and her lover. There's silence for a moment, and then Aidan's reaction is the one they were both least expecting. He starts crying.

* * *

Aidan walks away, silently, and Nikki follows him. Harry pulls his clothes back on and leaves, a huge lump in his throat, but he can't really blame anyone other than himself. He should have known the day this started that it was always going to culminate in one of those awkward reveals.

Nikki sits down in the kitchen with Aidan, and she's about to say something, about to start clawing maybe an inch of forgiveness, maybe salvage something – after all, before anything else, he's the father of her daughter, and her daughter's her most precious thing – when he holds up his hand.

His voice is heavy, not even accusing, more _ashamed. _"Where I'm from, marriage is a one-time thing, Nikki. Something you get into, and no matter how badly it goes, what you're never going to get out of it anymore, you stick with it. I know we'd fallen apart a long time ago… I can't help wanting a son, I can't help wishing I could go back and live at home, you can't help loving your job, and you can't help not being able to have another one, I know that, I just…" he sighs, and for the first time, his eyes meet hers. They're somehow resigned. "I know we're over, now, Nikki. I'm not asking for any kind of explanation, I don't want one. I guess… I guess I'm just utterly disappointed this hasn't turned out to be anything I thought it was going to be…"

"Aidan, we can… look, I-"

He shakes his head. "Don't. I'll pack tonight, and I'll be gone in the morning. There's a big firm in Dublin that was advertising for a new prosecutor a few weeks ago – maybe they still are. I think it's time we both just put our hands up and admitted that this hasn't been anything for a long time…"

She cries, then, because he's far too good of a man for her.

"What'll Leanne think?"

"She'll be alright. She'll be with her mummy… she doesn't see a lot of me anyway… she can come and stay…"

"So this is it, this is all over?"

"This has been over for a long time, Nikki. I'm never not going to be disgusted by what you've done, I'm never going to forgive you, it's a mortal sin, but maybe we needed something like this to tell us we needed to walk away."

* * *

She calls Harry the following evening, when Aidan's packed and gone. Leanne's had a few tears but finally fallen asleep, and suddenly her big old house feels so empty.

He's back in New York, he got the earliest flight he could, and he hadn't been expecting anything. The guilt is eating him inside out, he destroyed a marriage, he never thought he'd get that low.

She starts the conversation with "my marriage is over" and he doesn't know what to do then, because this is all back to front, this is all wrong.

**Hope you enjoyed! More parts are planned!**


End file.
